Culture

The Three Ways To Measure Social Media

September 5, 2016

According to the Forrester brief on improving social marketing maturity, chief marketing officers are being judged on three primary key performance indicators (KPIs), especially when brands measure social media. Those are: Customer Acquisition, Customer Retention and Brand Value and Reputation. In a way, that’s something we’ve been saying for a few years now. I’ve long recited the three most common business metrics business owners and executives cite as most important as being how much money we spent, how much money we saved and are our customers happy.

Either scenario paints a pretty clear picture: We have to be tying our marketing dollars to top and bottom line revenues and only to soft metrics that lay the ground work for successful top and bottom line revenues.

As a social marketer, this means you must run all your strategies through a pretty clear litmus test to measure social media. Ask yourself:

Does my initiative help acquire new customers? How? How can I measure that?

Does my initiative help retain current customers? How? How can I measure that?

Does my initiative build brand reputation or value? How? How can I measure that?

If you are unable to answer any of the three with a “yes,” then start over. If you’re unable to answer the how and how can I measure parts, think harder.

Want to know how you’re being measured? Ask your boss how he or she is. If Forrester is right, you can damn sure bet these three KPIs are going to trickle down to you.

How do you measure social media? Does it align with the above? Share your perspective in the comments.